December 26, 2007

This Week in Legal Times...

Fire up the Yule log, lower yourself into an easy chair and lose yourself in this week’s Legal Times. The holidays haven’t slowed us down any.

We’ve got Attila Berry following the starting-salary race. Who will be the first to $200,000? Williams & Connolly is within spitting distance, having bumped first-year associate salaries up to $180,000. Who’s next? As Dan Binstock, a legal recruiter with BCG Attorney Search, told Legal Times, “These salary wars are like the game of chicken, and it would not surprise me if select New York-based firms upped the ante by raising starting salaries to over $200,000.”

Jeff Horwitz documents the exertions of indicted hotel magnate Stanley Tollman, who has taken the extraordinary step of hiring lobbyists to shake the Justice Department. Tollman settled in London shortly before being charged with dozens of counts of bank and tax fraud in 2002. He’s got lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic, and now he’s got BGR Holding, formerly Barbour Griffith & Rogers, on his side. His PR agent has paid BGR more than $1.8 million to drum up a public policy and media campaign decrying American prosecutorial abuse and the current U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty.

Joe Palazzolo covers the Senate Confirmation hearings of Deputy Attorney General nominee Mark Filip, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. It took about 20 minutes, he writes, before senators asked the inevitable: Is waterboarding torture?

Also in the Legal Times, coverage of the CIA tapes hearing in U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr.’s courtroom last week, a look at readers’ picks for the best books of 2007, and Tony Mauro reports on the possiblity of cameras in the high court. Dig in.